Mike Amble, senior vice president of operations and engineering at Fidelity National Information Services, sees the new Fast Files feature as particularly useful to his organization. The company provides technologies to financial institutions and handles mortgage loan processing.

"We tend to deal with a lot of odd forms of information," he said. For instance, when a house is sold, all the documents related to the sale, including appraisals and title documents, are sent back to the mortgage company in paper form, then scanned and stored. Fast Files will allow users to store large objects such as images in the 11g database as fast as storing such unstructured information in traditional file systems.

Like other beta testers, Amble also welcomes Real Application Testing, the ability for customers to effectively record a segment of their database operations, then use and replay that recording as a testing environment instead of having to spend months creating a test bed.

Amble hopes to migrate his organization over to 11g in 2008. "In the beta testing, we've not found a lot of issues, it should be a very easy transition," he said. One area where he'd like to see Oracle become more open is in enabling the management of multiple encryption tools, both Oracle and third-party software.

Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies at Oracle, estimated that more than 1,500 developers and technicians have worked on 11g. The company engaged in a "huge amount of testing," he said, running the beta software on Oracle's server farm of more than 2,000 processors.

The company already has a parallel development project under way to work on 11g release 2. One area not mentioned in the listing of 11g's new features is grid computing, which is what the "g" in both 10g and 11g stands for. "We're doing a lot of work in grid technologies for the next release, which will make grid infrastructure even easier to adopt," Mendelsohn said.

Mendelsohn also confirmed earlier reports that Oracle won't be rushing to bring out an 11g update for its free Express Edition (XE) database. The new version will likely come with the release of 11g release 2.

According to Gartner's latest figures released in June, Oracle was the worldwide market leader in the relational database management system market with a 47.1 percent share, trailed by rivals IBM in second place with 21.1 percent of the market and Microsoft in third position with a 17.4 percent share. Back in April, fellow analyst IDC's initial 2006 figures painted much the same picture.

"We don't really worry about the competition," said Charles Phillips, Oracle's president. "We have such a lead." Oracle's challenge is how fast it can meet its customers' needs, he added. He dismissed IBM as deriving 90 percent of their database revenue from mainframe and Microsoft as being "regulated to Windows." Oracle offers its database on a number of operating systems, including Linux.